The Defense Department is preparing to ask Congress for an increase of more than $100 billion in its controversial warfighting account to skirt a mandatory budget cap, but some government officials are worried it will only further the account's appearance as a slush fund.

President Trump has nominated Christopher Scolese, director of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, to be the next head of the National Reconnaissance Office. Before heading Goddard, Scolese served as the associate administrator at NASA headquarters as well as the organization's chief engineer. Prior to his work at NASA, Scolese was a senior analyst at McLean, VA-based General Research Corp., where "he participated in several SDIO programs," a NASA bio reads, referring to the Strategic Defense Initiative Office, a predecessor to the Missile Defense Agency.

The director of the Combat Capabilities Development Command, now under Army Futures Command, says it's partly his responsibility to tell AFC what it can realistically achieve within its aggressive time lines to develop modern systems.

One day after the top American commander in the Middle East told Congress he was not consulted before President Trump announced his decision to begin pulling U.S. troops out of Syria, the Pentagon's top civilian in charge of special operations has told lawmakers that former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis was right to oppose Trump's planned withdrawal.

The Pentagon expects to submit its fiscal year 2020 budget to Congress in March, more than a month later than previously planned because of delays driven by the longest federal shutdown in U.S. history, according to two government officials.

From advanced software to autonomous systems to directed energy weapons, the Defense Department lacks the adequate tools, ranges and skills to fully vet many emerging technologies Pentagon leaders say are crucial to renewed great power competition, according to DOD's head of operational testing.

The Defense Department and intelligence community have not adequately resourced or utilized space testing infrastructure that would support more operationally representative threat simulation, according to a new report from the Pentagon's top weapons tester.

The Pentagon wants to "aggressively" embrace cloud computing by moving the military services and defense agencies to the Defense Department's "general-purpose" cloud or designated "fit-for-purpose" environments, according to a newly published cloud strategy.

Inside the Army tracks the service's emerging role in the post-Iraq and post-Afghanistan national security strategy. Extensive coverage is devoted to ground-warfare weapon programs, including the entire portfolio of combat and tactical vehicles.